the storyteller's prerogative
by faithunbreakable
Summary: Methos tells lies and he tells truth. The difference is not alway obvious. Gen ficlet.


Disclaimer: I own nothing.

A/N: Palate cleanser and hopefully, writer's block breaker. Effing weird, as these things are wont to be. Some play on archetypes and storytelling formulas. Written in thirty minutes.

Summary: Methos tells lies and he tells truth. The difference is not always obvious.

.

**the storyteller's prerogative**

.

Methos is five thousand years old and his name is legend.

He doesn't remember anything about his life before his first death, about living as a human, growing up, being able to get hurt. He remembers this: Lightning, pain, blood, horror and the silence after a kill, louder than ever before, deafening. He remembers something stirring inside of him, something new and alien.

He remembers never fearing death anymore.

.

That is a lie.

.

Methos says he is five thousand years old because the number is convenient and when people dig, when they ask questions, he tells them he doesn't remember being mortal.

He feeds them crap about Caesar and the Rolling Stones and the great men of history. Roman cookery and Bedouin songs, whatever his companion wants to hear and never a word of what really happened because that is his secret to keep, his life, his truth. He has lost everything else, but his identity, those few years at the beginning, they are his and he will keep them.

Besides, the stories are much more interesting.

.

That is also a lie.

.

The first time he meets Amanda, she's a scared little thief under her teacher's wing and she asks his age, bold and bright and uncouth and he tells her the same thing he always says:

Five thousand years, my dear.

That is a thousand years before he meets the Highlander, who asks the same question and gets the same answer.

Five thousand years, my dear.

Sometimes he wonders why no-one calls him out on the lie.

.

That is the truth.

.

Five thousand is a number like any other and it might even be true. He doesn't know. How do you keep track of time across several continents, through a dozen calendars, through ignorance and more important things? He might measure time in scars but he has none, in age, but he is ageless. In losses, most certainly, but his body is, for all its refusal to die, still essentially human and that means it forgets.

Faces blur, names fade, words become dust. Scents stay with him the longest, but they are not conductive to measuring anything except the length of time a body has been rotting. Rotting, like all the marks he left on the world have rotted away.

Five thousand is convenient, but he has no idea how close to the truth it is.

.

That is a lie.

.

He gets caught up in one hell of a religious debate with Darius around the time of the crusades. For decades, every time they see each other, they fling new arguments around.

Darius, while agreeing that the crusades are utterly useless and not God's will, still argues that religion is necessary for mankind to survive.

Methos, who once was his own religion, who was called god and smote his followers for looking at him wrong, disagrees. He says religion makes people weak, makes them dependant. A man who believes in nothing, he tells the priest, is a stronger man than one who falls to his knees and prays in times of need.

When Darius asks how he knows, he tells him that he has seen it. "There was a time before religion, you know? And I was there."

.

For a certain given value of religion, that might or might not be the truth.

.

When they ask him how old he is, he says five thousand years because none of them, not a single of those children, can imagine the number. To them, a thousand seems like a mountain looming in the distance, reachable, perhaps, but utterly far, still.

Five thousand is so far out of their reach that they don't question it, don't wonder. Five thousand years might as well be ten thousand, might be a hundred thousand. Beyond that point, it really doesn't matter.

.

That is the truth.

.

He keeps telling people, through the ages, that being the oldest does not mean being the first. It only means being the last one left of a bygone age.

.

That, too, is a lie.

.

Sometimes he gets caught up in his lies.

Not because anyone calls him out, but because he tells them too often. A story told a hundred times develops a bit of a life of its own. It gains texture and depth and at one point, it becomes hard to know if it is, in fact, only a story.

He has been telling stories since times unknown, some of them true, some of them false, some of them both.

He finds it hard to distinguish.

Maybe he was a Roman soldier when Caesar reigned. Maybe he was a senator. Maybe he was a beggar in the streets and once felt the great Emperor's kick. He has told all these stories and eventually, they were all true.

Some things he remembers even though they never happened, others he has forgotten even though they did happen and other still he has buried too deep to ever reach again.

Things so painful, so horrible, no endless, that he fear them, fears the mere echo of them.

.

That is, by God, the truth.

.

This is one of those things:

.

Before he was called Methos, he was called something else and before that, something else.

Before he claimed to be five thousand years old, he claimed to be a god and before that, he claimed to be the son of the Sky, the child of the Earth. He claimed to be eternal.

Before he became a civilized man, he was a monster and before that, a horseman. Before that, no-one knows.

Before he walked through Tibet he walked the rest of the world and before that, he walked through the ice and before that, he walked the continents as they were still whole, still one.

Before that he walked the earth while it was still hot under his feet, still burning in places. He walked before there were animals and before there were plants and before there was air.

Before that, he walked the streets of Los Angeles as the world was ending in fire and ice and he knelt over a lover's corpse as everything went black.

One world ended and a new one began and he was there.

He has always been there.

Through all the worlds and all the ages, there had been a man who has spun lies and truths and tangled them up until there was no way to tell them apart, until the man himself did not know and could forget.

He remembers, sometimes, between the worlds, when darkness stretches and the universe reforms, but he is always very careful to forget again.

The echoes that remain are more than enough.

.

"How old are you really?" Duncan asks, one night, long after they have met, barely a blink to Methos.

He shrugs and leans back into the sofa, swirling his beer in its bottle. "Does it matter?"

Duncan considers the question for a long moment, then shakes his head. "No."

Methos exhales slowly and nods.

.

.


End file.
